SpotHero Design Leader

Quick Summary

As the Director of Product Design for the B2B / Parking Operator side, I lead a team of 3 product designers that own 8+ product squads. Quick view: 30% product and company vision/strategy, 30% product design processes, 30% team manager coach and hiring, 10% IC design, and other various duties to create the best possible product team. Recently, I’ve helped define company goals using correlative data and user research, rewrote our design career ladder, led a research project for a future partner, and shared Annual Check-In feedback with the designers. Additionally, I lead hiring for the team, am a partner in the 2023 company planning, and define the product vision for the B2B side of the market.

When hiring, the core traits I look for are deep curiosity, a drive to be better than you were yesterday, and the forethought to be proactive when possible.

Results

• Aligned the design team of 9 on a new career ladder; accounting for Maker, Manager, and Researcher roles. Run multiple rounds of official continuous research/year with the team providing clarity, growth opportunities, and team equity.

• Adapted team processes for a team that recently spreads across 3+ cities, for a team eNPS of +48 (“great”)

• I pair with the Product Management team to create quarterly and annual product plans for 15 squads, and a ~150-person Product and Engineering team.

• Lead through ever-changing company climate (covid, team growth, rotating executive leadership) with 100% retention (over last 18+months, a team of 9)

• Align team on our core design OKRs (summarized for brevity): higher design quality, stronger company influence, tighter research processes.

Below is a list of recent quotes from the last round of anonymous feedback from direct reports (via skip levels and forms):

“Danny organizes and communicates direction for all of the operator league designers and I have seen how he thinks at a higher level about the product vision and strategy and cascades that down into more incremental changes. I see that he gives energy to understanding problems and calmy directs towards learning as much as possible to guide choices. His leadership is more nurturing than dictating and I think this is incredibly powerful and yields good results.”

“I love working with Danny. He is probably the best manager I’ve had in my career so far.”

“There isn’t a company value missing in Danny’s work. He consistently builds trust, has fun, communicates well, listens and understands, and pushes us to think and innovate.”

Printable Case Study

BlueAccess - Bluetooth Garage Access

Description: BlueAccess is a project that graduated out of our Labs team to become one of the core offerings of SpotHero with the goal of creating the simplest, cheapest parking access method for users and operators alike. The lean team invented and patented a pair of Bluetooth hardware sets, backend integrations, digital signage, and mobile flows for parking garages and parkers. Simply turn Bluetooth on, open the app, and the gate will automatically open for the parker.

Process: We started by listening to users explain their pain points of having inconsistent access types (over 175 ways to enter a garage in the USA!) and not understanding how to use them. I conducted user interviews, contextual inquiries, and surveys to reach our existing and potential customers. Additionally, we identified a strong market need to have better control over their data collection and a digital access platform via interviews with operators. These research findings were referenced often and ultimately drove our next steps over the course of a year.

In previous research, we uncovered how much the environmental context affects users’ perceptions of the experience. With this in mind, we partnered with operators to install alpha, beta, and production-level hardware and user flows to test out a real product in a real scenario. There were many challenges throughout our project, but through learning often and evolving quickly, we brought the 2 different integrations (zero-touch and one-tap) access methods to market and are actively scaling to hundreds of locations.

Involvement:  Lead designer on the project. I collected and created business requirements, ran squad OKRs and planning sessions, designed the end-to-end experience (from physical to digital), reviewed work with Legal, ran analytics, and created testing platforms. This project was collaborative with many, many teams in SpotHero (from accounting to garage operators, to software and hardware engineers). Huge shoutout to the engineers and my fellow design team for all of their awesome attitudes and brilliant work throughout the process.

This was on iOS, Android mobile apps, SpotHero’s web Admin, physical and digital signage, and operator service flows.

SpotHero Dev Tools - Documentation

Description: Built on popular demand, the SpotHero Parking API was built to allow Partners to self-service and include the SpotHero parking experience into the apps and websites . While we had an internal API, we wanted our next step to focus strongly on improved technical specs, self-help tools, and educational content our world-class partners expect to see. This product entailed new branding, developer docs, a lightweight CMS, and a completely rebuilt API. Check out the live build.

In addition to building out the developer documentation, I actively help grow relationships with partners, build pitch decks, consult them on parking best practices, and design experiences for their user bases.

Process:  Reacting to our baseline analytics and usage interviews for our V1 of the API, I formulated problem statements and dug into the the problems, expectations, and motivations each user persona had. Through multiple iterations and explorations, we landed on a self-service sub-domain with a simple navigation, detailed scenarios, and straight-forward documentation for both partner engineers and product managers. As a new external product, I created a new design system and brand while working with engineers and partners to better understand what features and technical specs would help them achieve their goals, and collaborated with our team to organize a V2 and V3 timeline for the API.

Success was measured based on “Leads Generated” and “Time to Partner Go-Live.” Ultimately, I ran 3 rounds of usability testing, iterating based on the findings, launched a responsive site, and effectively closed multiple partners within the first 12 months.

Involvement:  Lead Product Designer. I conducted the initial discovery research, design, and content writing and architecture of the developer documentation for the responsive website. Additionally, I initially was the acting Product Manager and partnered with the engineering manager, VP of Strategy, and stakeholders to build out the product timeline and positioning.

Neighborhoods.com - Responsive Web

Description: We believe a "home" extends beyond just four walls and a roof, and into the neighborhood you place your roots in.  With that in mind, the Neighborhoods team built a real estate responsive website focused on finding the best possible neighborhoods and homes for our users, using usability testing, surveys, prototypes and A/B testing.

Process: I was approached to run testing and research for the recently launched Neighborhoods.com website.  As the first iteration was already live, I was able to collect user feedback from Google Analytics, in-person interviews, surveys, and usability testing to create a long list of suggestions and future enhancements.  Since that initial dive, we run weekly tests, talk to users quarterly and implement other research tools - all while redesigning the site's core features and, most importantly, learning about our users and their motivations throughout the entire, complicated home-buying process.  View an artifact of some of our earliest testing.

Involvement:  As lead UX designer, I implemented the company's first "full-funnel" testing and research strategy, manage A/B testing for multiple products, provide ongoing employee education about user-centric design, run "user learning" sessions with other team leads, and of course, analyze our current products and propose (and flow & wireframe) enhancements and future products.

Mango - Sales App

Description: Full-funnel native application for hundreds of internal sales managers.  

Process: Built as part of a pending merger's pitch, we created a brand new sales engagement app that simplified Charter's hundreds of sales executives' lead creation, qualification, nurturing, and personal development.  Over the course of 3 months, my team and I collected and wrote user stories, conducted in-person and phone interviews, wireframed multiple solutions, selected potential vendors, and built a working iOS prototype to pitch to the acquisition team.  Touch points included finding leads on a map, nurturing lead through relevant and timely information, task reminders and management, user encouragement and training, reward processing.  To-date, this was my favorite project I've ever worked on.  Prototype can be shared in-person only.  

Involvement:  Team lead, project manager, lead UX designer. Working closely with Charter's VP of sales, I collected businesses goals, current API restrictions, vendor associations, and user research to determine approach and guide the prototype.

TechMobile - Technical Field App

Description: Tablet app built from the ground up with multiple goals in mind - make field technician's day-to-day activity as effective as possible, create an engaging experience that the tech's enjoy using (and stay longer!), reinvigorate a stagnant culture around tech and simple processes.

Process: My team was approached early on to recreate everything about how field technician team works.  The team envisioned a whole new experience; from simple interaction w/ the tool, to how these employees are rewarded for effective work. One of the biggest challenges we overcame, was selling the proposed sweeping changes to a huge business team. One of the artifacts we created to help prove the value was an InVision prototype.

Involvement: Sole UX Designer and project lead. Conducted initial user research, prototyping, and strategy. Also moderated usability testing with technicians and pitched ideas to business team. Delivered wireframes, personas, testing results, and flows to UI team.

Spectrum - Wearables

Description: Android Wear and Apple Watch apps that send customers insightful, and timely information on their favorite channels and shows.

Process: Originally, this product was simply pitched as a "marketing gift" by the company. We knew big things could come in small screens. I worked with a small, agile team to quickly iterate and create separate apps at time of device launch. Led initial research into a new (at the time) medium and prototyped, tested and worked hand-in-hand with dev and design to create a beautiful, and unexpected, experience for our users. 

Involvement: Lead UX Designer for both platforms. Conducted research, guerilla-tested prototypes, and created wireframe flows.

Allstate Mobile - Native Apps

Description: The self-service app for over a million Allstate customers. Allstate Mobile allows customers to manage their accounts and provides additional user-value with welcomed tools such as the award-winning QuickFoto that simplified small insurance claims. 

Process: Allstate Mobile is a living creature that is constantly growing and changing. The app started as a design refresh in 2012 and has since added over 20 innovative tools and projects as of 2014.

Involvement: Wrote all content for the app, conducted competitive and usability research, and led interaction design for multiple tools within the app. Consistently juggled between 8-12 moving projects at a time. Ran multiple client workshops to uncover business requirements and define content strategy.